I wanted to plug a couple bits of media related media that I find interesting. If you’re looking to learn more about the field, there are some great podcasts out there that will keep you informed and offer you tips from industry professionals.

First off, This Week in Media, from Alex Lindsay of the PixelCorps. This is a weekly discussion show about news from the industry. It’s fairly non-technical in nature, and is a good resource for keeping up on broader trends.

Next, the VFX Show, also from Alex Lindsay. This is a weekly indepth look at the visual effects work on recently release movies. This is a great one if you’re interested in the post-production workflow.

In among the new camera news yesterday, there was a second press release from Canon about the HD wide angle lens for the XL-H1. It’s been given a price ($2999) and a ship date (November) but doesn’t seem to have been otherwise changed from the previous release about it, back ’round NAB. So, yeah. Exciting?

AMD announced today its intent to buy ATI, a move that could have some interesting ramifications in the industry. It will be very interesting to see what sort of impact this has on Intel/ATI relationships – does it push more vendors into the Nvidia camp? I’m not sure it’s such a great thing for consumers – the graphics industry is already far too homogenized. And hey, huge mergers between established companies always work out for the best, right?

I’m making available the source for the QTInfo project which does a lot of the heavy lifting on the backend of Media Mill. This was my solution to break down the wall between PHP and Quicktime. It’s a RealBasic project (rb2006r3) and makes use of the MonkeyBread plugins.

I wanted to note a few things which make the project interesting. Follow the jump for extreme geek content.

The Smoking Gun has an interesting writeup on the movie budgets of M. Night Shyamalan’s productions, up to the current “Lady in the Water.” Perhaps of most note to this audience is the complete rundown of the budget for The Village, which really helps show the details of what goes in to a major production.

AVCHD was announced a while back, but today saw the release of the first (to the best of my knowledge) shipping camera using that format.

So, just when you were thinking that HDV, HDCam, DVCProHD, XDCamHD and the rest weren’t confusing enough, here’s a new format.

The cameras that have been announced are the Sony HDR-UX1 and HDR-SR1 (thanks Engadget) . The UX1 records to DVD, whereas the SR1 records to a built in disc. Surprise Surprise, the DVDs that you record will be playable in BluRay players, along with a computer (with special software).

As you might guess from the name, AVCHD uses MPEG-4 (AVC/H.264) to record your HD content. So, if you thought HDV was a pain to edit, get ready for a new load of fun.

To be fair, these cameras are very squarely aimed at the soccer-mom set – folks who want HD content to watch on their 50″ plasmas when the family comes over for a visit. But frankly, I have nothing good to say about these cameras. Internal disks are the wrong way to go, in my opinion, as you’ve now got a fairly fragile, non-expandable bit that you’re tied to for recording. Similarly, recording to a DVD format, especially in a proprietary DVD format, is rather disappointing.

Minor story, but worth noting that JVC has announced the HD110U HDV camera. As best as I can tell, it’s not much more than a software update for the existing HD100U. I really hope that’s not the case, or else there are sure to be some annoyed HD100U owners out there.

I know there’s not much incentive for manufacturers to add features to hardware they’ve already sold, but it does bug me when something that could be delivered as a firmware update becomes a whole new product. I’m rather suspicious that this was largely the case with the DVX-100/A/B, and plenty of other cameras. I hope that mentality changes as the Camera/Computer wall continues to collapse.